Working Tractor Beam of the Day

Before getting too excited, this isn't exactly the Death Star hauling in the Millennium Falcon, however, two physicists at New York University...actually, we'll just let them explain it:

David Ruffner and David Grier of New York University instead projected two Bessel beams side by side and used a lens to angle them so that they overlapped, creating a pattern of alternating bright and dark regions along the length of the beam. Fine-tuning the beam causes photons in the bright regions, initially flowing past a chosen particle in the beam, to scatter backwards. When these photons hit the particle, they knock it to the next bright region. The particle is thus constantly pushed close to the beam's source.

Obviously this is all at a microscopic level, but it's still a tractor beam!